Triumph custom bobber ‘Bad News’

A few weeks ago, this beautiful Triumph custom turned up on Chop Cult, one of the best old school custom sites. It’s a dirt-track influenced bobber that attracted a lot of attention at last year’s David Mann Chopperfest; the word was that it was built by a guy from California called Jeremy Hoyer, but other information was scarce.

So with a little help from Chop Cult’s Bill Bryant and Four Aces’ Wes White, I managed to track down and speak to the very helpful Mr Hoyer.

‘Bad News’ apparently started life as a beat-up, worn-out race bike that Hoyer found in a garage in Kentucky. He’s a mechanic for a dirt bike race team, and he wanted a bobber project to give himself a change of scene. “Being a race team mechanic is cool, but it gets boring building the same bike over and over again.”

Bad News got its name from a conversation Hoyer had with his roommate, while staring at the bike the night Hoyer brought it home. “My roommate had asked what I knew about Triumph customs and I replied, ‘Nothing, it’s probably all gonna be bad news!’ So, the name stuck throughout the build process.”

You’d never guess, but Hoyer had never built a Triumph custom from scratch before: “It was a great lesson in ‘what not to do’ … I tried to keep everything very simple and clean. I tried to reuse every original part I could. I didn’t want to lose any character or history associated with the bike. If it was OG and I could refurbish it, I did.”

A lot of the look and feel of this Triumph custom comes from Hoyer’s racing background; he describes the look he wanted as ‘vintage racey’. “I hope people enjoy the bike as much as I do,” Hoyer says. “It was fun to build, it’s a blast to ride, and I’m looking forward to my next project. I have a book full of ideas!”